To Love And Only Love
by blowersgate
Summary: It is impossible to love and only love. A One shot set after one of the last episodes of season 6, I won't tell you which one. Set before the finale.


**Author's note: I wrote this in about 2 hours, 2 and a half maybe. It was a challenge, I bet my friend I could write a 2000 words one shot of the introspective kind about Cuddy in less than 3 hours. I did and she felt it wasn't THAT bad so I'm posting it. I hope you guys will like it.**

* * *

Who is Lisa Cuddy?

He's on her mind, all of the time. And there hasn't been at least a week in the last twenty years or so where she hasn't thought of him. No wonder men never really stood a chance with her. To love and only love isn't something she believed herself to be able to achieve, as a goal, as a true romantic purpose. The stories she read as a little girl had such an impact on the way she imagined how her prince charming would come and love her unconditionally. What she hadn't imagined though was how she would never be able to love him back the way it was fictionally possible for him to love her. She had had enough, by the time she was 35, one date after the other, one night stand or pseudo semi full blown relationship that wouldn't go past the dreaded first month and so on. No perspective of getting married, having kids unless on her own...Having kids, yes. That had been a solution, a solution to find peace with what she thought was a true inability to love another person. If it were her own flesh and blood, she stood a chance at being able to give pure and unadulterated love. Able to give back what she never wished 'to hear say one grunted syllable at a time'. Why the need to quote him? Oh, yes. She knew why.

She has always taken care of herself, she doesn't drink much anymore, she chose to become a vegetarian -backing it up with her need and, she had to admit, stupid studies, because everybody is different. She has been a doctor for a long time now and she knows -and a good one, although he does regularly claim her only job is to be an administrator. She has to smile at the idea that he must think she's a masochist to allow herself a couple of hours at the clinic everyday. She is in perfect shape, really, except that by the time she was in her forties, she had to realize she would never be able to give that love she had resolved herself to give. She couldn't conceive. But there is always hope for the hopeless, maybe. For her, Rachel proved that to be true. Rachel will love her back, showing it more deeply than with her cooing and later, laughter and need for her mother's attention. Nature is that amazing for the thinking one. By the time she will be 15 though, she will hate her, but only momentarily and Cuddy would approve that. She knew she would make a great mother no matter what. Nevertheless, she was only able to figure that out because of him. He had challenged her so many times on the subject: from her inability to find suitable sperm donors, from the IVF treatment to the loss of Joy. But when she got Rachel, she had his blessing already, in a twisted way. Yes, in a twisted way, he had made her believe in her ability to love someone unconditionally.

Most people think she loves her other baby -her first, though, completely. They are wrong. She loves it in a different way, the way you can't love a child. She loves it the way she loves a man. She has this thrill that she is in control and that pleasures her, she got to be the Dean by the time she was 32, she got married to it, she owns it through a contract. The ties that bind her to it is her phenomenal background, her achievements, her hard work. She flirted with physics when she was 15, she dated mathematics a few more years, shared a passionate kiss with the first frog she was given the chance of dissecting. She lost her virginity to her SAT s and got her first real relationship with college. She got engaged with med school and bought a house when she started to practice medicine as the endocrinologist the years had certified her to be. PPTH is her husband. How screwed up is that? In what untwisted world could a man top one of the three major hospitals in New Jersey? She can't help but think she is the prince charming to this hospital. Just like in the fairy tales she used to read, her hospital is made of concrete and it just can't love her back. Less pressure, just a great fictional ride. House says she loves her "baby" and that she is an idiot. Does he have any other reason to think that except for she shows indubitable interest in it and administers it without so much as a faux pas? Yes, he does, otherwise, she wouldn't feel that irrevocable way. Although she wished it was irrevocable.

But running a hospital is frustrating, rarely does she practice real medicine. It's not her job anymore, she's the wife, her freedom is limited by a contract. She has obligations, mostly. Her only satisfaction is that she saves lives indirectly and for her long hours, obtains a well deserved paycheck by the end of the month. With that she bought a beautiful House, an expensive car, designer clothes and shoes. And sufficient income after all, helped her adopt Rachel. But she can't share her attires with anyone, except him. Not to say other men haven't been pleased with what she wears but they can't really seem to show it to her in anything other than the normal way... They look at her like she is perfect but when his eyes set on her, she's looked at from a special point of view. And that makes her feel special. She loves borderline abuse, she thrives on conflict because no matter how much it hurts sometimes, he's the kid next door, trying to get the prettiest girl in the neighborhood's attention. A wicked grin on her faith and she reminds herself of the fact that she went looking for him... and he had forgotten all about it...no, he just never knew it. She wouldn't have let that slide: she allowed him to enter her life, she never made herself available to him... no, no, she would never have. And at that, she can't help but close her eyes and smile.

Twenty years is a long time to build a relationship. Losing contact never was a crucial factor because they reconnected on several occasions. But never the way they connected that one night. In the arms of this particular jerk, she felt elevated. To the rank of a woman playing with real fire. That fire that is dangerous because it gives you a fever hot of a hundred and three and burns you down to a state you think you can never recover from the morning after. She lied her way through it when they danced together at the conference a couple of month ago, saying she was just as into it as -she never actually finished that sentence. He had given her hope that night. She could see herself loving and hating someone on an equal basis. It is impossible to love and only love because you can only love what you can hate the most. That is what she had found out when she was reading prince charming stories. She hated the very idea of a sweet man loving you unconditionally that you couldn't possibly love back. Therefore, she realized her guilt, her remorse, her instinct to fix what is broken -something most doctor who swear on the Hippocratic Oath should have buried inside them, never were the reasons why she felt that way about him. She sees how things could be just the way they are. Change never was an option, his leg might have made him a harder person but he would, has always been the same man: a tall, sexy man with blue eyes and a boyish grin that manages to brighten his typical frown-like face when things simply feel right. And as rare as those are, they are enough to her. Because that special trait of him makes him even more of a jerk, an ass, an obnoxious curmudgeon. All the things she is supposed to hate, like a trademark, it's there to remind her that under this facade, there is this certain amount of truth that he enjoys annoying her.

He doesn't want anybody else to manipulate, he doesn't want another boss. He wants her. That surely must mean something -if not the world to her. Sure, she could have kept yelling all those years that he couldn't get himself hired anywhere anyway or at least for so long before his infarction but she didn't see the point -except when he would try to get closer, somehow, under her skin. Her problem and she knows it, is that he already is. He always was. He is the longest relationship she has ever had with a man after her father. And then she starts crying, under the shower spray. The only place where she can keep her composure these days. She is a liar and the first person she is lying to is herself. She does admire her success but she loves something...someone more than herself. And unless she comes face to face with her demon, she can't love herself. Lisa Cuddy is living a lie, the fairytale she had sworn herself she would never live. But she is scared, like the majority of this earth and its inhabitants.

But she feels special because he, who does a fine job at pretending he loves nothing other than himself, wants her. And has always wanted to reach out to her. After all this time, it had to be when she was almost at peace with her recent choices. They were supposed to be final. They now can't be so. Gregory House is in her head, in her tight skirts, literally and figuratively, and in the electrical impulses that make her heart beat. To love someone and only love him is impossible, especially when you don't hate him unadulteratedly. With the shortness of breaths she exhaled from due to her sobbing, she let out a few laughters thinking it's just easier to convince yourself you love someone than admit you pretend to hate another one. And that it's one hell of a problem she wished she never had to face and yet, she feels it completes her, it makes her feel alive. She is not in a routine, she never was, she is... in love with a man that managed to be a failure but a legend in his own terms. A true flawed man, the man many have lust after in the hopes of making him less miserable and mostly, less of a jerk. But she loves the jerk, he is hers. And she knows, oh yes, she knows, that she is his. She wipes her eyes and tries to calm her breathing and sees the clearest version of her own private fairy tale for the first time. They are altered versions of a prince and a princess. He is a bad ass and she actually sees that unlike most fairytale, there have been many men for her to lust after, better men. But he is the only one her thought process (something most princesses lack if she were to be honest with her child-self), obviously, and the tingling feeling in her chest that starts when she sees in, whether good or bad, allowed her to choose.

She turned her shower spray off, got a towel and exited her bathroom after making sure she had taken most of her make up on, washing any sign of her crying away in the process. She put her nightgown on and climbed into bed. Firmly settled under the duvet, she kept the lights on and took the book that she had placed on her nightstand. "Funny, it's the last thing I want us to be." She recalled his words, they had led her here, in her bed, alone, never having dinner with him and therefore, thinking too much about why they have never been friends, why they never were mere employer and employee. She opened her favorite fairy tale and dozed off to sleep reading it. Her last thought was about how Gaston should have been written as the beast with a heart instead of a complete jerk. Oh yes, her life with Lucas is easy but completely _unfairytally_.

-Fin


End file.
